Recently I read Permutation City by Greg Egan and was intrigued by the concept of the Autoverse that plays a central role in the plot. The Autoverse is basically an artificial universe based on a cellular automaton and is complex enough to support a simplified chemistry used to create artificial life. The whole thing runs on distributed computing services that people rent time on.   The book was written in 1994 and in the meantime technology has kept marching on and provided us with an infrastructure very similar to what the Autoverse ran on in the form of the Internet and various computing providers such as Amazon’s EC2 service.

So, I’ll  be doing some projects here to learn more about cellular automata and using Amazon’s computers.